Functional decentralization in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

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Abstract

The aim of this study was to apply the hypothesis of functional
decentralization to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth
Circuit for the years 1968-1970. It was expected that there would
exist a number of smaller specialized sub-courts handling particular
issue areas. While a number of statistically significant individual
patterns were found, and three specialized sub-courts were identified,
these findings cannot be interpreted as substantively significant. The
anticipated pattern was that a large percentage of the issue areas
would emerge as specialized. The specialized sub-court found in the
Libel issue area is negated by the fact that the issue area had only
seven cases. In terms of the overall pattern of behavior of the
court the two specialized sub-courts remaining cannot be interpreted
as having any substantive significance.

That the anticipated patterns of behavior were not found may
have two explanations. The first is that the seating patterns
discerned occurred solely through chance. Thus, for the period 1968-1970, assignment of judges to appellate panels in the United States
Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit was done on a completely
random basis.

The second possible explanation is that there exists a fault in the research design which led to inability to reject the null
hypothesis. There are several areas of potential error. The first lies in the typing of cases. Inevitably, unless the researcher is
skilled in the principles of law and has sufficient time to study
every case before typing, some forcing of cases into inappropriate
case types will occur. Future researchers employing this technique
will have to decide for themselves how much forcing is acceptable.

In this research, approximately five per cent of the cases were forced.
When spread over twenty-four primary case types, this five per cent
may not have had any significant effect, but the potential for error
cannot be discounted nor is it possible to assume that the forced
cases were distributed evenly through the range of case types.